Shannon Castleman, executive director of Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery, scheduled to begin its programming this summer in Church Hill. (Photo by Jay Paul)
There’s a rusty playground set missing its swings outside the egg yolk-yellow, flat-topped 90-year-old building at the corner of P and 35th streets in north Church Hill. Inside it smells — understandably — stale, but natural light saturates the place and illuminates in golden shafts the dust motes floating around Shannon Castleman. She points out a chalkboard in the front room of the Sunday-school-turned-daycare-center. “This is one of the original boards,” she says. “The manufacturer’s sticker on it says 1925.”
I glance up at the vintage tin ceilings of the school building as Castleman leads me on a tour, and marvel at the white columns spaced evenly in the large central room, soon to be a classroom area housing computers and art supplies. A tiny room toward the rear will be the darkroom where students can develop their photographs, Castleman tells me, and in the front, there’s studio space. The building was designed by Charles M. Robinson, one of Virginia’s architectural godfathers. He designed more than 400 public schools throughout the state, including Richmond’s Binford Middle in 1915 and Thomas Jefferson High in 1930, as well as James Madison University and buildings on the University of Richmond’s campus. I’m a sucker for old buildings because they usually have a story to tell. Castleman’s new initiative, Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery, is about to write this space’s next chapter.
Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery will occupy a church at 3511 P St. built in 1906, as well as the adjacent structure, which was built by respected architect Charles Robinson in 1927. (Photo by Maya Jackson)
In mid-March, Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery was founded, with Castleman at the helm as executive director. An artist, photographer and adjunct professor in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Photography & Film, Castleman returned to the U.S. in 2013 after living 10 years abroad. Her first job out of college was teaching photography at Dar Al Hekma College, a women’s university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The experience helped shape her artistic philosophy and worldview.
“My students saw me as an anomaly — a woman, an artist, a photographer, pursuing her dream and making a career of it,” she says as we sit in the sanctuary next door at 3511 P St. For now, it’s still the church it has been since 1906, when it was called Thomas Branch Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church. Jesus and winged angels still keep watch from a colorful mural behind the pulpit, though no one has worshiped there in years. As part of Castleman’s vision, the church will be transformed into an exhibition space — where a group of emerging local artists will choose what to show, on a rotating basis. The building, dubbed P35 Gallery, will host art-related events — film screenings, theater productions, lectures, spoken-word performances.
Her students in the Middle East, and her experiences teaching and building community-driven art programs in places like Singapore, Vietnam and Cuba taught Castleman the importance of inclusion in artistic spaces, and making those spaces accessible to all. “In some ways, it made me more sensitive to being the ‘outsider,’ to knowing what it feels like to be the ‘other.’ Inclusion is crucial.”
Artists need to leave to see, she says plainly. “When you’re taken out of your own culture, and then you reenter it, you see it with new eyes and it energizes your work.” In Richmond’s art community, “we’re getting there, but we’re not there yet,” she says, noting that our creative spaces don’t always reflect the diversity of the city. “The goal for Oakwood Arts is to introduce people in this neighborhood to local creative pockets, include them in the overall narrative of our art culture, and prepare them for creative industries with practical applications, like filmmaking and photography.”
Then, too, she hopes to learn from the neighbors. She’s friendly, and has already started building bonds in the community. When I pull up for our interview, she’s across the street from the church chatting with Carl, a longtime Oakwood resident. A young lady whose home sits on the opposite block wanders over a few minutes later, saying she’s been curious about the church and yellow building for a while. Castleman answers her questions and invites her to come experience the art center for herself when it opens. “Everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach,” she tells me later.
The tin ceiling inside the Oakwood Arts space, original to the 1927 building (Photo by Brock Saunders)
Skill building is an essential component of Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery’s mission. In this way, the program is similar to another distinctive Richmond art organization, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Founded in 1963 by Elisabeth Scott Bocock in a house in Church Hill, VisArts was then known as the Hand Workshop. It gave local craftsmen and artists a supportive atmosphere to hone their skills and display their work, and offered art classes and programming to the community. At Oakwood Arts, area teens and adults will be able to take tech-based art classes, where instructors teach them how to use Photoshop and other graphic design tools, edit film and video, build websites to market their work, create portfolios, and more. Additionally, recreational art classes will be offered on a sliding scale, and seniors may sign up for technology and basic computer skills classes. “We want to bridge the digital divide,” Castleman says.
Collaboration with other galleries, art programs and community organizations is a top priority for the center. Storefront for Community Design, Art 180, Candela Books + Gallery, and Afrikana Independent Film Festival are among the groups Castleman names that are already working to bolster the range and diversity of Richmond art, while broadening the cultural perspectives of many in the city. Oakwood will partner on projects not only in its own space, but in the wider community, too.
Last week, Virginia film industry professionals gathered on a panel at Armstrong High School; the event was part of Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery’s initial programming. Virginia Film Office Director Andy Edmunds, “The Wire” actor/director and director of the forthcoming film “Juanita” Clark Johnson, prop master for “Loving” Patrick Storey, documentarian/journalist Brian Palmer, and several other pros answered students’ questions about how they came to work in a creative field, and outlined their roles. Next up: The Birdhouse Project, a sculptural installation to be created on Oakwood Art + P35 Gallery’s ground by kids age 8 to 12. Castleman says after the center gets settled, they hope to work with nearby nonprofits such as the Robinson Theater and Blue Sky Fund to build a community garden on a lot two blocks away.
Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery sits in the heart of north Church Hill’s Oakwood community. (Photo by Maya Jackson)
Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery also will welcome its first international artist-in-residence soon after opening. Massa Lemu is an assistant professor in VCUarts’ department of sculpture and extended media, a position he’s held since September 2016. Lemu, who hails from Malawi, reluctantly agrees that his work can be technically considered conceptual art, but insists that it’s not easy to label.
“I use my art to express an idea I have at the time, so you could say conceptual art, yes,” Lemu says, “but the idea decides the kind of material that I will use.” His multidisciplined approach yields a dizzying array of pieces enhanced by text, drawings and multimedia elements. Like his series of cardboard signs with hand-written messages — they’re either powerful or puzzling, depending on how you read them, but provocative all the same. He’s left pieces of his work all over the world; some of them aren’t made to last and languish behind gallery glass. His art is forever evolving, moving, growing, he says.
In Richmond, Lemu senses a cultural transformation breaking forth, shaped by the hands of artists. Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery will find its place in the rising tide, he says. “I think the project is going to have a significant impact on the community there,” he adds. “We need more voices that reflect the demographics of the city, more cultural expression. We need to know who the city is. I’m attracted to the idea of being part of Richmond’s reformation, of taking part in that change.”
Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery now embarks on its journey in the same community where fine artist Benjamin Wigfall was born and raised. A pioneering African-American painter, Wigfall, who passed away at 87 earlier this year, was a reflection of his Church Hill community and all that it has to offer. Castleman hopes Wigfall’s legacy inspires and encourages the artists-in-training who now live near his home.
“That’s what Oakwood is about,” Castleman says as we walk through the church’s old double doors and back into the sunshine. I breathe the fresh air deeply as we pause on the steps to admire one of the arched windows. Except for a layer of dust, the building looks as ready for Sunday service as it ever did. “We want to give the people who live in this community access to professional artists who look like them and who don’t, and we want to show people how to get on that path. At the same time, we’re here to listen and learn from this community."
Oakwood Arts + P35 Gallery is raising funds to complete repairs to its facilities ahead of its scheduled summer programming.
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